Does LSU have an IT department? As of 10:10pm Pacific this had been up for at least 30 minutes at LSUshop.net...



Hat tip to @PointForwardPro.

Today is my first day as Executive Producer for SFGate.com, the Bay Area's best portal site and online home of the San Francisco Chronicle (part of Hearst Corporation). Although I'm still sad to have left all the great folks at Yardbarker and FOXSports, I'm very excited to be joining such a well-respected and large website. And those who know me know I never really knew anything about sports anyway -- now I can pretend to know something about news, politics, and all sorts of other things too. Big ups to the folks at Hearst for taking a chance on a basement-dwelling digital-type like myself. When I was in law school and got my first digital gig posting NBA cartoons on AOL's FanHouse, I never would have guessed that I'd eventually end up in a position like this. I will do my very best to make my new employers proud (no more rape jokes for now, I guess... I'm working on my Twitter cred). Thanks everyone for all the kind messages this past week since I left YB. In the words of American poet Nicki Minaj: "I win, thrive, soar, higher, higher, higher, more fire!"

At first I thought maybe the "Similar to @alana_g" profiles were just loosely based on a general interest category like "sports." But apparently there is an algorithm that determines the profiles, and I doubt the algorithm would recommend me for any kind of legitimate editorial job. Let's hope my business cards at the new job won't include my Twitter handle like my Yardbarker ones did!

Big thanks to LadyBallers for giving me 15 minutes on the soapbox as part of their Female Sports Professionals series. Please head over to LadyBallers to check out the full interview (including all my unsolicited career advice for anyone trying to break into the sports industry) but here's an excerpt about how I ended up at Yardbarker:

Please give us a little background on how you got to your current role:

I ended up at Yardbarker through networking. In 2007 I got an email from Pete Vlastelica (then CEO of Yardbarker) who had seen a Greg Oden video interview I’d done for FanHouse and wanted to meet me. We kept in touch and he hooked me up with video interviews with Yardbarker athletes here and there. Over a year later when I was looking to make a job move I reached out to Pete and I was fortunate that he gave me an opportunity to work full-time with Yardbarker’s athletes. As the company evolved over the next few years I tried to involve myself in new areas and I now manage our editorial group and wear various other hats.

And check out the rest of their Female Sports Professionals series -- tons of fascinating experiences and perspectives!

My friends Jennifer and Onye are big fans of the actor Don Cheadle... or maybe not, I have no idea. But anyway, I decided I would do something generous and spend my own money ($15 each) to have Don Cheadle call them at their offices and jazz up their boring lawyer lives for two minutes.



I have to say, Don Cheadle is an amazing actor, because in the movies he doesn't even seem to have much of an accent.



This was easily the best $30 I ever spent -- and I consider it an investment, because I'm pretty sure Jennifer and Onye will both be buying me more than $30 worth of drinks and gifts to thank me for their incredible experiences. I don't think they've had this much fun since that one night in law school...

You too can buy Cheadle calls for all your friends (they range in price from $2 to $20 each). When you checkout, please note that you were referred by Alana G. I don't think it will get you any kind of discount, but it might increase my chances of getting a date with Don Cheadle.

You can also pay to have Don Cheadle call your friend and pretend to be a turtle, which is what I did for my old pal John:



Personally I think if you're going to pay for Don Cheadle to make a call though, why waste your money on him pretending to be a turtle.

Oh wait, I think this was just the red carpet of GQ's Super Bowl party, not the set of American Idol. Rats.

My Yardbarker colleague Jeff and I were in Dallas for the week before Super Bowl and produced 14 videos for our sponsor T.G.I. Friday's. You can see all of them on our T.G.I. Sunday blog. I highly recommend the ones that feature Randy Jackson, the best red carpet interview of all time:







Dude, come on man, whattttt!

AOL's FanHouse (or FanHaus for those on the inside) is coming to some sort of transition. Depending on how you spin it, FanHouse is either being killed or being absorbed by Sporting News, which will be AOL's new source of sports content.

I owe the start of my sports career to former FanHouse executive producer Jamie Mottram who hired me as a blogger when NBA FanHouse launched in 2006, and to his successor John Ness who later hired me as a producer. I left FanHouse just a few months after taking over for Ness, and I've never been sure where the Haus was going since.

No tribute to FanHouse would be complete without boobs, so let's reminisce about the Fantasy Sports Girls, whose partnership with FanHouse was introduced shortly after I gave notice that I was leaving in 2008.



The girls were quickly nixed and replaced a few months later with columnist Jay Mariotti. You've come a long way, baby?

As I've said before, there were and are some very talented people at FanHouse, and I wish them the best in whatever the future holds.

Scout has an article about Stanford's domination of the Pac-10 all-conference teams. A fellow Stanford alum pointed out that there are some suspect names in the section listing honorable mentions:


None of the highlighted guys appear on Stanford's official roster. Maybe Warren Wonka and Edward Snate time-traveled to us from some saloon in the Wild West, but surely "Ernest J. Mudblower, Jr." is some kind of sexual reference right? Help me out.

UPDATE: Warren Wonka is explained on page 10 of this. I feel so left out of Stanford humor.

It seems Rasual Butler accidentally tweeted pictures of his manly parts and then scrambled to claim his Twitter account was hacked and to ask everyone to delete their retweets. In his zeal to thank his supporters, he seems to have missed the subtlety of my middle school humor.


It's ok Rasual, I know Twitter humor can be hard.

Thanks Gawker for this video of the most horrifyingly enjoyable high school girls' hurdles race.



LOLCI (laughing out loud, crying inside). InjuryRate is a bad person for turning me onto this.